Uh Oh! Indonesia’s President Dissed as His Website Gets Hacked

Yesterday, the website of Indonesia’s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, at presidensby.info, got hacked by an Indonesia-based hacker group that calls itself the Jember Hacker Team (JHT). The president’s homepage was changed into what’s pictured above, stating that the hacking was done by someone with the code name ‘MJL007.’

It took only a few hours for the website to be fully restored by the Indonesian government. Detik today cited the Indonesian minister of communications and information, Tifatul Sembiring, as claiming that the hacker did not really hack into the government’s website, but that the person simply redirected the IP address which is located in Softlayer’s Texas-based DNS.

JHT told the Antara paper (reported by SuaraPembaruan) that it was indeed them that hacked the president’s site because of the team’s discontent with Yudhoyono’s leadership in the last two terms. Furthermore, the hackers believe that corruption in Indonesia grew even worse under SBY’s presidency.

Interestingly, the communications and information ministry representative Gatot S. Dewa Broto believes that the perpetrator who hacked the government’s site originated all the way from the US state of Texas. That is based on the IP address and DNS that were tracked by the ministry. He hypothesized that the perpetrator might have just used the JHT name as a camouflage. While Detik in the same article suggested that the perpetrator might just be an Indonesian who forged the IP address to one from a Texas city. That’s something that is often done by hackers to avoid being traced.

There was a similar incident where the Indonesian president’s website got hacked back in 2007, during which the perpetrator not only changed the homepage entirely but also issued a list of demands to the Indonesian president. While the same JHT collective also hacked into the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) website in August of last year.

Jember itself is a regency of East Java in Indonesia. The jemberhacker.web.id address that is shown on the hacked page is not accessible at the moment. There’s no news of any of the previous hacking perpetrators from 2007 ever being caught by the government.